Primary Care Field

Primary Care became the first registered field in October 1993. Initially, consideration was given to establishing a Collaborative Review Group, but it was decided to establish a new type of entity known as a "field". This field would serve to coordinate and promote the mission of  Cochrane  within the primary care disciplines, as well as ensuring that primary care perspectives are adequately represented within Cochrane. The Field started in 1993 under the leadership of Prof Chris Silagy and was taken over by Prof Lorne Becker in Syracuse USA.

Diet and nutrition subfield of the Cochrane Primary Care Field

In December 2004, an exploratory meeting for a proposed Diet and Nutrition subfield was held in conjunction with the Fourth Heelsum International Meeting in The Netherlands. The Heelsum Workshops are held every 3 years and bring together nutritionists, general practitioners and behavioural scientists to discuss recent research and clinical issues relevant to nutrition in primary care. One half day of the meeting was devoted to the discussion of the potential formation of a Cochrane Diet and Nutrition Field. There was general enthusiasm about a Field from those in attendance. Several issues led to detailed discussion. One involved the inclusion of evidence from non-randomised studies, which are generally not included in Cochrane Reviews, but which form an important part of the evidence base for nutrition. A second issue involved the potential scope of the new entity.

Current structure of the Primary Care Field

In 2007, a collaboration of three academic departments of general practice in Auckland (New-Zealand), Dublin (Ireland) and Nijmegen (The Netherlands) took over the leadership from the department of Family Medicine, Upstate Medical University in Syracuse (New York, USA, Prof. Lorne Becker).

Currently, the new collaborators are channelling efforts into new areas such as developing a register for clinical prediction rules (CPRs), setting up a website and tagging existing reviews with ICPC-coded in order to make them more accessible to workers in primary care, enabling the products of Cochrane to be accepted and adopted into practice.

Cochrane is an international not-for-profit organisation, providing up-to-date information about the effects of health care. We produce the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, part of The Cochrane Library, the definitive resource for evidence-based health care.